Despite all potential differences between user communities, research infrastructures, federations, identity providers, and e-Infrastructures, they all work towards a common goal. And they are sufficiently alike that they might share some common policy frameworks. While it is always tempting to make ad-hoc policies, an open research commons benefits hugely from mutual understanding based on set of a harmonized policy frameworks and ways to compare the various best practice aspects.

The Policy and Best Practice Harmonisation activity works on operational and security aspects and policies to complement the technical research work carried out in the architecture and pilot work packages, and delivers a set of recommendations and best practices to implement a scaleable and cost-effective policy and operational framework for the integrated AAI. Following the Community First approach, and driven by the use cases from the AARC Pilots, the policy harmonisation task produces both generic guidelines (such as on data protection and acceptable use policy) as well as specific guidelines for communities that are implementing the Blueprint Architecture.

In AARC, we place primary focus on a selected set of elements that are currently the most pressing for either communties or generic Infrastructure AAIs:

Lastly, it is imperative that any policies are agreed to in a scalable way: bi-lateral agreements do not work in a multi-stakeholder environment. The work on scalable policy negotiation addresses this issue by exploring ways of expressing and agreeing policy in a federated world: Snctfi.